Just Curious - How many of you have used floppy drives on your PC?

This is a discussion on Just Curious - How many of you have used floppy drives on your PC? within Shifting gears, part of the Around the Corner category; On other technical forums , of which I have been a member, I come across members who have been in ...

On other technical forums , of which I have been a member, I come across members who have been in the IT field for long. I think this is a forum which has a mix of professionals from all fields, who have been using computers for long. So, a large number of you would have seen computers of various types. Todays PCs have all kinds of peripherals, but come without any floppy drives.

So, I am curious to know,

How many of you have used PCs which had 3.5" floppy drives?
Going one step back, have any of you used 5.25" floppy drives?
Going one more step back, are you aware of 8" floppy drives?

I started using PCs in 1989, until 1991 I rarely had access to PCs with hard drives. So I always used PCs with two 5.25" floppy drives (but no hard drive) those 2 years. The disk capacity was 360KB for low density or 1.2MB for high density.

In 1991 I saw the first PC with 3.5" drive with 720KB and 1.44MB capacity. Didn't get access to those until 1993. I still remember loading Borland C++ compiler from a 22 disk set.

Got my first work PC with hard drive in 1991, the capacity was 20MB.

Got my first work PC with CD-ROM in 1994.

My boss had used punch cards in the 70s, I only studied them, never used.

5.25" to boot to DOS & work on BASIC - from 88 to 93.
3.5" to store files, as boot disk & to run FDISK - till 2002, basically till most BIOS supported boot from CD Drive option.

I still remember, single 3.5" floppy used to cost Rs 20/- for 1.4MB data.

same here. although i used first portion of it only for playing games after loading DOS. and I don't regret having an incompetent computer instructor . because of the 1.4 Mb limit we learnt all the compressing options, JPG image formats etc.

Earliest computer game I have played is Packman on 5.25" floppy. Our teacher used to give this floppy only when all of us in the class completed their assignments . This was in school.

When I moved to college there was Netware everywhere. So floppies were not required. Anyway we still backed our files on a floppy, just in case the SysAdmin messes & deletes the network drive.

When I started working, it was Windows 95 everywhere & CD ROM was common. I remember our group importing a Yamaha CD Writer for Rs 25K from US. Later Windows 98 came, then 2000, Me (most horrible release) & XP/2003. XP SP2, 2003 have been a very stable release. Now we support Vista/2008.

I still have few 3.5" and 5.25" disks with me! Souvenir peices! I used to use the 5.25" disk for my school projects!!! Horribly unreliable! I had to keep saving the data in new disks, as the disks used to to get easily corrupted.

Oh we had and still have an IBM XT(I think that's what it was called) which is as old as me(22 years) but is no longer working now :(. But we used that computer for a good 15 years with of course the 5 and a quarters! And that drive was even exchanged for a new one in the mid-nighties for another five and a quarter. That computer had even a monochrome yellow monitor built into the CPU casing, with a folding keyboard so we just had to shut the keyboard after which the computer could be carried around! And I have played so many games with those 5 1/4's, dig-dug, pacman, space invaders, bubble bobble, pretty much everthing there used to be that time!
We have even an Epson LX-80 dot-matrix printer - which is again the same age as me - which is still being used by my Dad along with my current Windows XP equipped computer. Compare that to the slew of current ink-jets, my first inkjet bought around 2000 conked in 2 years flat.
Sorry for going a bit OT guys!